This week, Suchi bought a book at an antique store in Harrisburg, and somehow we ended up here talking about making Cheetos from scratch. In episode two, we’re talking about the rise of the trad wife movement and what it looks like on the internet. We ask what brought us here, who benefits when women romanticize losing rights, and where do we go from here? Featuring themes from Foucault, sexism, and feminism.

Assigned Readings:

Woolf, Antonia, Calli Tzani, Maria Ioannou, and Thomas James Vaughan Williams. “Social Media’s Dangerous Fantasy: How the ‘Trad Wife’ Movement Fuels Inequality and Gender-Based Violence.” Assessment & Development Matters17, no. 2 (2025): 36–41. https://doi-org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.53841/bpsadm.2025.17.2.36.

Bower, L. J. (2025). The thorn in feminism’s side: black feminist reconceptualization and defence of #tradwives and the #tradwife movement. Journal of Gender Studies, 34(7), 1037–1053. https://doi-org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1080/09589236.2024.2423198

Bower, Laura Jane. “Shifting the Focus Towards ‘Tradhusbands:’ A Black Feminist Examination of the Visible Tradwife and the Invisible but Integral Role of the Tradhusband.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2026): 186–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843261442452.

Okay so Anshita got blocked. By an influencer. For citing extra readings.

In our debut episode, we use one very petty moment as a launchpad into some big questions: What is knowledge? How does it come to exist? What counts as research? And who decided a degree makes you the authority on human behavior; because Instagram certainly has thoughts.

Welcome to the first episode of Ctrl+Society, where we connect the dots between your For You Page and the assigned readings nobody actually did.

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Assigned Readings:

Duffy, B. E. (2015). The romance of work: Gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(4), 441–457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186

Gershon, I. (2016). "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man": Typing the neoliberal self into a branded existence. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(3), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.017

Murray, R. C. (1980). Review of The credential society: An historical sociology of education and stratification, by R. Collins. American Journal of Education, 88(4), 488–495. https://doi.org/10.1086/443519

Nisbet, M. C., & Scheufele, D. A. (2009). What's next for science communication? Promising directions and lingering distractions. American Journal of Botany, 96(10), 1767–1778. https://doi.org/10.3732/ajb.0900041

Skea, C. (2021). Emerging neoliberal academic identities: Looking beyond Homo economicus. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 40, 399–414. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09768-7

Tsemberis, S. (1999). From streets to homes: An innovative approach to supported housing for homeless adults with psychiatric disabilities. Journal of community psychology, 27(2), 225-241. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6629(199903)27:2%3C225::AID-JCOP9%3E3.0.CO;2-Y

Wasike, B. (2022). When the influencer says jump! How influencer signaling affects engagement with COVID-19 misinformation. Social Science & Medicine, 315, 115497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115497

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